Happy birthday Natascha Ragosina!

A very happy birthday to the hottest female fighter in the world, Natalia Yurievna Ragozina!

For whatever reason, her name is usually anglicized as Ragosina, even though з is ISO-properly romanized as z.

One of her nicknames is "the Russian Tzarina". She's the best argument I've ever seen for us returning to the bosom of Mother Russia.

Happy birthday!

Hottest female fighters in the world

We'll start off with an honorary mention for Regina Halmlich, who retired in 2007 but is a true pioneer of women's boxing. And hey, she was pretty foxy, too.

On to the list!

6. Zulina Munoz

La Loba, Mexico's gift to boxing, is darn cute.

5. Mia St. John

A tae kwon do black belt turned model turned pro boxer, she notched up 45 wins, including 18 knockouts, and has since turned to MMA. She also found the time to pose for Playboy.

4. Kina Malpartida

The 2009 WBA super featherweight world champion!

3. Gina Carano

Where do I start? Gina Carano, a Muay Thai fighter who took part in the first ever sanctioned women's MMA fight and is damn hot.

She's in a movie which I have to see, and was in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, which was fun. She's so tough that when Ewan McGregor punched her in the face on the set, he nearly broke his hand.

2. Eva Wahlström

Finland's second-hottest athlete is simply gorgeous.

She also happens to be by far the most accomplished female boxer in Finland's short history.

1. Natascha Ragosina

I said at the beginning that to qualify on this list, you have to be hot and good. Natascha Ragosina is not only beautiful, but deadly. She has a boatload of titles in boxing and kickboxing, and I'll let this image speak for itself:

She's a super middleweight, but this woman literally punches above her weight. Not only does she have a boatload of super middleweight championships, but she was also the 2009 WIBF heavyweight champion. Here's video of her defeating then-heavyweight champion Pamela London.

Now that's hot.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering why Laila Ali isn't on your list, this is your answer. She's retired now, but when she was still active, she refused to fight any of the top female fighters in her weight division, like Ragosina. That takes her off my list.

Natascha Ragosina is not only beautiful, but she can kick your ass. What more can you ask for?

Happy birthday Anna Semenovich!

A very happy birthday to Anna Grigorievna Semenovich!

Back in the 1990's, she was a competitive ice dancer, winning the Finlandia Trophy twice and placing tenth in the 2000 world championships.

Since then, she's apparently set up as a sort of Russian answer to Christine Smith.

All I know is, she's beautiful. Happy birthday!

Gadhafi’s Gold-money Plan Would Have Devastated Dollar

Alex Newman Friday, 11 November 2011
http://thenewamerican.com/economy/markets-mainmenu-45/9743-gadhafis-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar

It remains unclear exactly why or how the Gadhafi regime went from “a model” and an “important ally” to the next target for regime change in a period of just a few years. But after claims of “genocide” as the justification for NATO intervention were disputed by experts, several other theories have been floated.

Oil, of course, has been mentioned frequently — Libya is Africa‘s largest oil producer. But one possible reason in particular for Gadhafi’s fall from grace has gained significant traction among analysts and segments of the non-Western media: central banking and the global monetary system.

According to more than a few observers, Gadhafi’s plan to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S. dollars — demanding payment instead in gold-backed “dinars” (a single African currency made from gold) — was the real cause. The regime, sitting on massive amounts of gold, estimated at close to 150 tons, was also pushing other African and Middle Eastern governments to follow suit.

And it literally had the potential to bring down the dollar and the world monetary system by extension, according to analysts. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a “threat” to the financial security of the world. The “Insiders” were apparently panicking over Gadhafi’s plan.

"Any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world's central banks,” noted financial analyst Anthony Wile, editor of the free market-oriented Daily Bell, in an interview with RT. “So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward [for] removing him from power."

According to Wile, Gadhafi’s plan would have strengthened the whole continent of Africa in the eyes of economists backing sound money — not to mention investors. But it would have been especially devastating for the U.S. economy, the American dollar, and particularly the elite in charge of the system.

“The central banking Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing base of demand and the immediate silencing of those who would threaten its existence,” Wile noted in a piece entitled “Gaddafi Planned Gold Dinar, Now Under Attack” earlier this year. “Perhaps that is what the hurry [was] in removing Gaddafi in particular and those who might have been sympathetic to his monetary idea.”

Investor newsletters and commentaries have been buzzing for months with speculation about the link between Gadhafi’s gold dinar and the NATO-backed overthrow of the Libyan regime. Conservative analysts pounced on the potential relationship, too.

“In 2009 — in his capacity as head of the African Union — Libya's Moammar Gadhafi had proposed that the economically crippled continent adopt the ‘Gold Dinar,’” noted Ilana Mercer in an August opinion piece for WorldNetDaily. “I do not know if Col. Gadhafi continued to agitate for ditching the dollar and adopting the Gold Dinar — or if the Agitator from Chicago got wind of Gadhafi's (uncharacteristic) sanity about things monetary.”

But if Arab and African nations had begun adopting a gold-backed currency, it would have had major repercussions for debt-laden Western governments that would be far more significant than the purported “democratic” uprisings sweeping the region this year. And it would have spelled big trouble for the elite who benefit from “freshly counterfeited funny-money,” Mercer pointed out.

“Had Gadhafi sparked a gold-driven monetary revolution, he would have done well for his own people, and for the world at large,” she concluded. “A Gadhafi-driven gold revolution would have, however, imperiled the positions of central bankers and their political and media power-brokers.”

Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict.

In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”

The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.

Other analysts, even in the mainstream press, were equally shocked. “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power?” wondered CNBC senior editor John Carney. “It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”

Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing.

Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission.

While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity. Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow, however, may never be known for certain — at least not publicly.

The future of manned aircraft

This past summer, the Economist decried the expense of the F-35, and chided the American military for spending too much money on what would be "the last manned fighter". I'm willing to stick my neck out on this and say that they're wrong. There will still be at least one generation of manned fighters.

The Economist is wrong because they underestimate two important factors, of which the most important is sheer bureaucratic inertia. In practically all western air forces, the career path of high-ranking officers is that of a fighter pilot. Decades of propaganda and bureaucratic infighting have established the fighter pilot as one of the celebrated heroes of the modern military, and the core identity of the air force. That won't be given up easily. The move to unmanned aircraft would mean that bold, gutsy and manly fighter pilots will be replaced by guys with Playstation controllers, and even if the latter are more effective in combat, they're just not cricket. In Top Gun 2020, the young fighter jocks won't barge their way into a bar, drink like mad and wow the girls with their rendition of Great Balls of Fire on the piano; they'll sit in the corner, order some apple juice and turn up the J-Pop.

Bureaucratic inertia is made even worse by the fact that air forces the world over are still, to some extent, young services fighting to establish themselves. Go back 50 years and witness the intense fighting on both sides of the Atlantic: in the States, over whether the army is allowed to operate fixed-wing aircraft or not, and in the UK over who controls naval aviation. That may seem like a long time ago, but in both countries, there is a level at which air forces still perceive themselves as younger and less secure services than the other two. Unmanned aircraft question the very existence of a separate air force: if, after all, you're just going to fly drones, then the army already has people doing just that. Why would they need a special service of their own? The navy could easily ditch naval aviation in favor of NCOs flying drones off their ships. It's not just the pilots that will go, after all, but nearly all of the support staff and facilities will be rendered irrelevant. The massive fixed airbases that were such a huge liability in the cold war will finally meet their end.

It's a well-established fact of defense policy that the armed services will, in the pursuit of administrative goals and inter-service rivalries, make inefficient decisions. What makes this even worse is the lack of a real military-technological rivalry to drive development forward. Unlike in the cold war, the US doesn't have a real technological challenger. The Russians can still produce very good aircraft, but nothing with which to really challenge the F-22 and F-35 in terms of pure technology. In its current decrepit state, Russia is still years away from being able to mount any kind of challenge to US air superiority, and China is much further away.

Remember that in the cold war, Western fighter development was basically driven by intelligence panics. A new Soviet prototype would show up on the runway at Ramenskoye and be spotted by a US reconnaisance satellite; then the intelligence guys would try to figure out what characteristics it had. Because of the difficulty of getting solid intelligence out of the Soviet Union, this was mostly guesswork, and regularly led to incredible overestimates of Soviet capabilities. The actual characteristics of a plane like the Su-24 Fencer had almost nothing to do with the intelligence projections, but because all they had to go on were the more-or-less informed guesses of their intelligence, Western aircraft were produced to face a much more powerful threat than the real one. For instance, the F-15 Eagle, which some people consider the greatest air superiority fighter of the 20th century, was essentially created to meet and defeat what the West imagined the MiG-25 Foxbat to be. The MiG-25 was seen at a runway somewhere, and the intel guys panicked. "It's got swing wings and two engines OH MY GOD IT CAN DO MACH FOUR AND HAS MISSILES THE SIZE OF MY HOUSE!" The actual aircraft was, well, different, but the threat of the imagined MiG-25 drove the US to create the F-15. There's nothing like the Ramenskoye panics driving aircraft design now.

This combination of a lack of research impetus and real air threat simply means that the Americans can be quite content with a substandard jack-of-all-trades, master-of-fuck-all aircraft like the F-35, and even inflict it on unsuspecting allies at a gigantic price. Even if drones would be cheaper and more effective, the West can settle for the far more expensive and ineffective manned aircraft, because they're good enough. It also, in all likelihood, means that since a new generation of pilots will be trained up on the F-35, they will fight just as hard against the inevitable as their predecessors did, and will probably manage to secure a next generation of manned aircraft for themselves. After all, think of all the jobs that would be lost.

As a side note, maybe this could restart the US space program. After all, the air force will need something to do.

In summary, assuming, say, the US Air Force will switch to unmanned aircraft in the near future assumes a level of rational decision-making that is totally alien to any peacetime military establishment. As a piece of military hardware, the manned aircraft will far outlive its usefulness. As the Economist put it in a more recent piece, the pilot in the cockpit may be an endangered species, but he's surrounded by a gigantic bureaucracy dedicated to his preservation.

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And besides, the drones will just get taken over by Skynet anyway.

Ladies of Daegu

The 2011 World Championships in Athletics just wrapped up in Daegu. I love sports, especially beautiful women doing sports. Here's some.



Last time I wrote about track and field, I started improbably with a cute hammer thrower. I'd like to continue that trend by starting with a cute shot putter who also happens to be a world champion: Valerie Adams.

Now, I'm no schmoe, but check out those guns. She's real cute, too. Shame she's not likely to break any all-time records, given that almost all of them were set in the '70s or '80s, by women from the Eastern bloc. Yeah.



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The 100m sprint is a particular favorite. Norway's Ezinne Okparaebo put in a brave performance in the semifinals:

The gold medal, however, went to the equally beautiful Carmelita Jeter.

She also came second in the 200m, and looked stunning throughout.

And, finally, anchored the US to a gold medal in the 4*100m relay.

In the 1500 metres, Norway's Ingvill Måkestad Bovim impressed us by coming in sixth and being cute.

The most impressive track performance, however, came from Russia's Maria Savinova, who beat South Africa's Caster Semenya for the gold medal in the 800m with a fantastic final sprint.

She was awesome. By the way, I have to admit that Caster Semenya does look kind of like a dude. However, that's absolutely no justification for the disgraceful way she was treated in the whole ridiculous gender controversy that arose in 2009. It was absolutely disgusting, and showed a total lack of respect for both her as an athlete and as a human being. I'm glad she's competing again. I'll have to get back to all this "gender testing" nonsense later, but for now, here's one more picture of Maria:

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In the heptathlon, our favorite Jessica Ennis ended up taking home a silver medal after, as the Finnish media put it, tripping over the javelin.

The gold went to Russia's Tatyana Chernova.

The women's javelin throw turned into an unbelievable event. South Africa's Sunette Viljoen took the bronze after setting an African record, and the gold medal was decided in the last round when Barbora Špotáková broke the championship record to take the lead, only for Maria Abakumova to beat her with a new Russian and championship record of 71.99m. Awesome.

I think I'm a fan.

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My favorite event, as always, is the pole vault. I'm a huge Yelena Isinbayeva fan, so it was a real shame to see her fall short of the medals in her comeback championships.

After all, she pretty much single-handedly took women's pole vaulting past the five meter mark. I believe she's still the only woman to ever have cleared 5m, but I don't know that for a fact. She's awesome.

At Daegu, though, Jelena only narrowly beat the gorgeously buff Jiřina Ptáčníková for sixth place.

The undeniably cute Silke Spiegelburg, who I previously dubbed the Emma Watson of the pole vault, also struggled to a ninth-place finish.

Our congratulations to the medalists: Brazil's Fabiana Murer, Russian veteran Svetlana Feofanova and Germany's Martina Strutz, who took home a silver medal after setting a German record with a jump of 4.80 meters.

Gold medalist Fabiana Murer is also the indoor world champion, but this is her first outdoor world champs medal.

I'm already looking forward to the pole vault at London!



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It was a heck of a championship, and I really enjoyed watching it. As a dedicated anti-patriot, I'd also like to point out that these were Finland's worst athletics world championships ever, with no medals and no points finishes.

This blog on TV

Wow, I missed this. Earlier, I criticized Radley Balko for co-operating with Russia Today here. What I didn't know, and only found out just now, was that while Radley's response to my criticism was, well, underwhelming, Alyona Minkovski decided to address me on a video she published for her show on Russia Today.

It's strange to hear someone talk about my panties on television. What's stranger, however, is that Ms. Minkovski would bother to address my criticism on the air, by name and by showing a shot of my blog, but not actually talk about what it is that I said. In the video, Ms. Minkovski implies that I've said she shouldn't be allowed to criticize her government.

That's absolutely ridiculous. My actual criticism, which you can read from the link in the first paragraph, was directed at Radley Balko. This was the gist of it:

In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.

Another quote, this time more directly applicable to Ms. Minkovski herself:

Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.

I don't see how it's possible to read my post as implying that I think Ms. Minkovski shouldn't "dare" criticize her government. What I'm trying to say is that it's more than a little dishonest to criticize the United States for police brutality while working for the Russian government. Surely the two are different things.

When Ms. Minkovski says I should be concerned that US mainstream media isn't reporting on police brutality, I can only say that I am concerned. I've written about SWAT teams and the war on drugs plenty of times on this blog. But what I was trying to say in my previous post is that I'm also concerned that her network isn't reporting on similar stories from Russia. Why is it okay to downplay and ignore police brutality in Russia? For that matter, why is it okay for Russia Today to distort the truth in their country, while it isn't okay for American mainstream media to do the same? That seems like a double standard to me.

Seeing this video was a little bizarre. On the one hand, Ms. Minkovski and, presumably, her producers, felt a need to address my criticisms of her appearing on Mr. Balko's blog. However, they couldn't seem to bring themselves to actually answer my questions, but instead attacked a bizarre strawman. If anything, this would seem to confirm to me that my criticism of her and RT was well-founded. If her reply to a question on journalistic ethics is to distort the question beyond recognition and mock me for asking it, I guess that's all the answer I need.

Not to mention that me and this blog are much more famous than I thought!

The international drug war

On the one hand, Connecticut, USA:

BI: Connecticut Decriminalizes Marijuana Possession

Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut is expected to sign a bill passed by the state House of Representatives last night decriminalizing the possession of marijuana in limited quantities.

Wrapping up what the New York Times today called the state's "most activist, liberal legislative session in memory," the House voted 90 to 57 in favor of SB 1014, which would punish possession of a half-ounce or less with fines, rather than criminal charges.

First-time offenders would be hit with a $150 ticket; repeat offenders would get at least $200 but a maximum of $500 per offense.

According to the Hartford Courant, supporters hope the bill will save taxpayers money and provide "fairer treatment of those caught with small amounts of the substance."

Connecticut's non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis estimates the bill will save the state nearly $1 million and net upwards of $600,000 in new fines.

Connecticut joins the 13 other states in the U.S. - including two of its neighbors, New York and Massachusetts - that have already decriminalized the possession of marijuana in limited amounts.

That's not exactly legalizing it, but it seems to be about as close as they can get. And sign it the governor did, saying:

“Final approval of this legislation accepts the reality that the current law does more harm than good – both in the impact it has on people’s lives and the burden it places on police, prosecutors and probation officers of the criminal justice system. Let me make it clear - we are not legalizing the use of marijuana. In modifying this law, we are recognizing that the punishment should fit the crime, and acknowledging the effects of its application. There is no question that the state’s criminal justice resources could be more effectively utilized for convicting, incarcerating and supervising violent and more serious offenders."

What I especially like is the recognition that putting people in prison for smoking pot is ridiculous.

And on that note, the other hand: Russia.

Guardian: Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'

Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

(...)

The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".

Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."

While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.

The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.

Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany (addicts) a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."

I mean, there's a solution to the "problem" of prison luxury: send them to the Gulag!

Here's one direct consequence of their war on drugs:

Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

You'd really think that if they're so concerned with popular health in Russia, they might consider an AIDS epidemic to be somewhat more dangerous than people smoking pot. And because it's technically impossible to write about politics in Russia without doing the joke, here's the setup:

Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.

And here's the joke:

In Russia, the pot smokes you.

Radley Balko and Russia Today

Chances are, you've seen activist Adam Kokesh and his buddies get arrested with unnecessary brutality at the Jefferson Memorial. If not, here's the video:

What you may not know is which channel this show runs on: Russia Today, nowadays known as RT. Described by the Guardian as "the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire", RT is a TV channel funded almost entirely by the Russian government. In that same Guardian story, their then-editor-in-chief explains:

"I don't believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position."

And they do. Here's the Independent on the topic:

Russia Today, an English language service, was set up in 2005 to present a perspective from Vladimir Putin’s government as a counterbalance to Western global news organisations such as CNN and the BBC. Its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claims that the Russian state “doesn’t at all” interfere with the output of the network’s journalists.

But Shaun Walker, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, disputes this. “It is untrue that the channel’s journalists are able to report on what they want to without editorial influence; while as time has gone on there have been more features on “negative” aspects of Russia, there is still a total absence of any voices criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev,” he says. “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a “New Cold War” headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted “GENOCIDE” across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”

Indeed, one of their reporters resigned during the war in Georgia. Here's the Guardian:

Russians appear to be getting only one side of the story of the conflict in Georgia. According to a Moscow Times article, Russian television is showing the misery left by the Georgian assault in South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia's bombing of Georgia.

After William Dunbar, a correspondent for the English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report on Saturday, his scheduled reports later that day were cancelled by the station. He said: "I felt that I had no choice but to resign."

He added: "I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were cancelled. The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn't conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn't let me report it."

Of course, everyone knows how committed Russia is to the freedom of the press. The first Guardian article I quoted? Its author has since been expelled from Russia for no stated reason.

The idea for founding the channel seems to have come from former minister and Putin aide Mikhail Lesin, who wanted the channel to "polish Russia's international image". And they do, but not only by presenting Russian propaganda: part of their agenda is also to criticize Western countries.

For example, here's an RT reporter waxing lyrical over protests at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh:

RT: Who does this government consider an enemy?

The students were cornered, beaten, tear gassed, thrown to the floor and arrested – all for gathering inside a public park to express their political opinions.

This scene did not happen in a Third World country in the midst of a revolution. It occurred in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.

Of course, that very same year, a Gay Pride rally was held in Moscow. The rally was banned, and Moscow police had threatened the activists with "tough measures". When it went on anyway, police immediately arrested everyone present with "needless violence". Of course, that was better than some previous years when the police stood aside and let skinheads beat up the protesters.

You won't find any of this on RT: no reporters bemoaning the plight of the gay rights activists, let alone getting in amongst the demonstrators and writing harrowing first-person exposes of their arrest. No, on RT "Police disperse gay pride parade", without a hint of violence or impropriety. The channel unquestioningly accepts the official explanation for banning the marches, and under the sub-heading "A fight for gay rights or a farce?", goes on to lambast one of the organizers as a bully and a propagandist. Russia's embattled opposition gets similarly short shrift from RT, with no horror stories of police brutality.

Another topic that drew RT's ire is America's prison system. By contrast, read this Wikileaks cable or Amnesty International's report on Russia for some idea of what goes on over there; a topic you won't find any RT coverage on.

Finnish readers may be amused by the fact that notorious Finnish lunatic Johan Backman is a respected source for RT, quoted in stories like this one, which makes some hilariously over-the-top claims, including that in Finland, it's a crime to "criticize a legally operating organization". Their paraphrasing of what both Molari and Backman have said is also somewhat tenuously connected to reality. Molari and Backman are both rather well-known in Finland as extremists, and especially Backman is given fairly wide publicity in Russia because of his willingness to distort and exaggerate events in Finland in accordance with the Kremlin's propaganda line that Finland mistreats its Russian minority. That his views should be uncritically repeated by Russia Today speaks to the channel's ideology.

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So a TV channel funded by the Russian government isn't exactly delivering objective journalism. Big surprise. It does raise some interesting questions, though, and to introduce them I'll promote a blog called The Agitator, by Radley Balko, a journalist and libertarian. I have great respect for the man as a chronicler of what I consider America's gradual evolution into a police state. His paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I read his blog regularly.

This May, Radley went on vacation and left us with a collection of guest bloggers. Most of them did well, even if it was a little odd when one of them felt that if we only divided ourselves into competing factions that identify themselves by differently colored uniforms, the world would be a better place. I thought we were already doing that. Another guest gleefully insulted a 17-year-old boy and expressed the fond hope that he would be assaulted in prison. These are just a couple of things that rankled me, though, and overall it was fine.

One of his guest bloggers, however, was RT's own Alyona Minkovski. Here's a clip from her show, which runs on RT:

As it happens, Radley's appeared on RT himself. As he explained, he went on RT "because they asked".

Now, I have a problem with this.

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First of all, let me make absolutely clear that police brutality and the wholesale trampling of civil rights in America is reaching scary levels. Things like this, this and this are appalling, and so is the fact that the police will arrest you for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. The fact that police brutality and abuse is much worse in Russia is no excuse for the Americans or anyone else.

My problem is RT and the nature of their coverage. It's pretty obvious that they use a whole different yardstick for events in the US and in Russia, and much of their reporting consists of regurgitated Kremlin propaganda. They do go to some lengths to disguise this as critical journalism, but it's fairly obvious that when it comes to Russian interests, propaganda takes over. So when someone like Radley Balko attaches themselves to a channel like this, by appearing on it and hosting one of its reporters on his blog, I have a real problem with it, because he's lending his credibility to a Russian state propaganda operation.

I fully understand that there are economic incentives, direct or indirect, as well as the obvious political ones, for publicizing one's cause as widely as possible. In this particular case, though, that publicity comes with giving good press to the Russian state's propaganda machine; in other words, helping the Kremlin project a totally false image of Russia to the world. It also raises troubling questions about Mr. Balko's ethics as a journalist, in that he's willing to attach himself and his name to a government propaganda operation, seemingly without second thoughts.

In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.

To take just one example, Radley linked to the same Huffington Post piece I did above, on their questionable way of reporting an incident of police brutality in Washington, D.C. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it when RT glosses over Russian police brutality, though. In my books, that's hypocrisy.

Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.

It's a funny sort of libertarianism where you co-operate with one of the most repressive regimes in the world. I don't much care for it.

**

Last year, the Economist ran a piece on police brutality in Russia.

Cops for hire: Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy

THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.

Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.

American police brutality is alarming enough that I can't say it's nothing compared to what they do in Russia. Both countries' police forces at times terrorize their inhabitants like an occupying army. But having been to both countries, I'd still rather get arrested by American cops than Russian ones. Hell, I'd rather be raided by the Pima county SWAT team than by OMON. If American SWAT teams sometimes remind us of storm troopers, their Russian counterparts pretty much are the SS.

And one of the foremost critics of police brutality in America co-operates with their PR department.

Happy birthday Maria Sharapova!

Happy birthday to my favorite tennis player of all time, the divine Maria Yuryevna Sharapova!

Obama's foreign policy failure

When Barack Obama was elected, one of the campaign's favorite buzzwords was "change". In the field of foreign policy, the Obama administration was going to make America the darling of the world again. Remember the big New Beginning speech in Cairo? And the state visits that US critics called the "World Apology Tour" that were supposed to usher in a new era of American foreign policy?

So what actually happened?

Iraq

Almost two years ago, I predicted that if Obama actually goes through with the US withdrawal from Iraq, the consequences will be catastrophic. If the Iraqis are abandoned to their own devices, or to put it in Vietnam-era terms, the conflict is "Iraqi-ized", the country will face a real danger of collapse.

So far, this has been avoided through a simple ploy; the Obama administration has said it withdrew all US combat troops, leaving just 50,000 troops in the country. Back in the Cold War, it was customary for both superpowers to station troops in third countries but not admit it. Back then, they were usually called "advisers" no matter what they were actually doing. In the terminology of the time, the US has withdrawn all its combat troops, but left five divisions of advisers.

Now, with the supposed withdrawal carried out, Obama can declare victory. David Letterman actually said it best. Remember when George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and delivered his "Mission Accomplished" speech? As Dave put it: "Well, they're trying that again."

The real withdrawal is coming at the end of 2011. In terms of strategy, I believe these deadlines have a horribly detrimental effect on the coalition effort to stabilize Iraq. What the late 2011 deadline does is it gives all the al-Qāʿida -affiliated insurgents a target to prepare for. If you know the Americans are leaving on such and such a date, start planning to overthrow the Iraqi goverment immediately afterward. Until then, stockpile armaments and supplies and expand your infrastructure. I believe this is exactly what they're doing.

This is exactly what happened in late 1974, when the Americans had left Vietnam. Congress signed a bill banning any US military activity in Indochina, and President Nixon was impeached and resigned. Knowing that the Americans wouldn't intervene, the North Vietnamese Army overran South Vietnam in a matter of months. The entire process of Vietnamization, transferring the burden of the war from the American to the South Vietnamese armed forces, had been a complete failure.

There's a very real risk that the same thing will happen in Iraq a little over a year from now. Remember when George W. Bush talked about the axis of evil and all that, including the idea that Iran was supporting the Iraqi insurgency? He was ridiculed for it back then, but now we can read, via the New York Times, what Wikileaks has let us know about Iran's involvment in Iraq.

NYT: Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias

During the administration of President George W. Bush, critics charged that the White House had exaggerated Iran’s role to deflect criticism of its handling of the war and build support for a tough policy toward Iran, including the possibility of military action.

But the field reports disclosed by WikiLeaks, which were never intended to be made public, underscore the seriousness with which Iran’s role has been seen by the American military. The political struggle between the United States and Iran to influence events in Iraq still continues as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has sought to assemble a coalition — that would include the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr — that will allow him to remain in power. But much of the American’s military concern has revolved around Iran’s role in arming and assisting Shiite militias.

As of this writing, the Iraqi political process is still deadlocked, with no government in place. This year, Iraq ranked seventh on the Failed States Index, barely doing better than Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In all likelihood, the US withdrawal will leave behind a country in total disarray, if it isn't completely taken over by the Iranian-supported militias.

Whatever happens, the hurried retreat from Iraq will ensure that the eight-year war will have one enduring result: some 4,000 American soldiers will have died in order to cement Iran's status as the leading power in the Middle East. The only country that directly gains from the chaos in Iraq is Iran.

Over the years, several left-wing commentators have delighted in pointing and laughing at the US attacking Saddam Hussein, because in the 1980's, the West largely supported Saddam's regime. What they either don't realize, or leave unsaid, is that there was a very good reason why the Americans supported Saddam: his Iraq wasn't the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian islamism was seen as a much greater threat than Saddam.

The defining political dynamic of the Islamic countries of the Middle East has been that there is no clear leader. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran have all contended for a dominant position in the region, with the Iraqi-Iranian conflict being, in one sense, precisely about regional dominance. Now Iran is becoming more and more powerful, and the elimination of Iraq as a counterbalance is a major geopolitical victory for Teheran.

It might be worthwhile for the decision-makers in Washington to recall that the reason the United States became embroiled in Iraq in the first place, that is twenty years ago, is because of the threat Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia. Ever since FDR, Saudi Arabia has been seen as a vital ally of the United States in the Middle East; some readers may be surprised to learn that over the years, the Saudis have received more military aid from the United States than Israel. The reason for the Gulf War was the threat Saddam's Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia. If the Obama administration goes through with the policy of withdrawal, effectively leaving behind a failed state under the sway of Iran, all the Iraq War will have accomplished is to change the threat to the Saudis from the Iraqis to the Iranians.

It's ironic that in the 1980's, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war over the dominance of the Middle East. By some estimates, Iran may have suffered as many as one million casualties in the fighting. The war was inconclusive. Twenty years later, the US fought an eight-year war against Iraq, and this time, Iran won.

**

Afghanistan

Next summer, according to Barack Obama's timeline, the US will begin to withdraw from Afghanistan as well. If Iraq was seventh on the Failed States Index, Afghanistan is sixth. The post-Ṭālibān government of Hamid Karzai has turned into a dictatorial, corrupt regime reminiscent of South Vietnam at its worst.

The comparison isn't far-fetched: the coalition forces in Afghanistan are fighting an insurgency based in a neighboring country, waiting for the occupying forces to leave so they can take over. The key to Afghanistan is Pakistan, a fact that Obama seemed to recognize in pre-election debates but has resolutely ignored in office.

Just recently, we were told that American's most wanted man, Usāmah bin Lādin, is living comfortably in northern Pakistan, along with second-in-command Ayman aẓ-Ẓawāhirī and the rest of the gang.

The Daily Telegraph: Osama bin Laden 'living comfortably in Pakistan'

Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living comfortably in a house in the north-west of Pakistan protected by local people and elements of the country's intelligence services, according to a senior Nato official.

The latest assessment contradicts the belief that the al-Qaeda leader is roughing it in underground bunkers as he dodged CIA drones hunting him from the air.

"Nobody in al-Qaeda is living in a cave," according to an unnamed Nato official quoted by CNN.

He added that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command, was also living in a house close by somewhere in the country's mountainous border regions.

Pakistani officials on Monday repeated their long standing denials that the Saudi-born terrorist mastermind was being given safe haven.

Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Pakistani intelligence service has been playing a double game. In addition to channeling US and other Western aid for the anti-Soviet insurgency, Pakistani intelligence moved drugs the other way. Afghanistan has been the world's premier producer of heroin for a long time, and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence moves some of the stuff out of Pakistan. The money they make off the operation is used, among other things, to interfere in Pakistan's internal politics and to fund terrorist operations against India.

As part of this lucrative narcotics deal, the Pakistanis have a cozy relationship with the Ṭālibān, who also fund their operations through the drug trade. At the same time, they're supposedly a staunch ally of the United States and totally committed to the war on terrorism. While the intelligence service continues to move heroin for the Ṭālibān, there is a full-blown insurgency going on in northwest Pakistan, which has by all accounts become the most important basing area for the Ṭālibān operating in Afghanistan.

As in Iraq, so in Afghanistan: the US withdrawal will leave behind a failing state that will probably fall to the Ṭālibān. If this happens, the next target of the insurgency will be Pakistan, and in the worst case scenario, Pakistan will fall to Islamism. It's more than probable that the Pakistani government will have to come to terms with the Ṭālibān, possibly meaning a wholesale radicalization of the whole country and an escalation of the conflict with India.

For the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan before a viable government is in place and the Ṭālibān insurgency has been defeated amounts to, for all intents and purposes, abandoning the country to the Ṭālibān. If the Obama administration goes through with the plan, then the entire Afghanistan War will have been fought for nothing.

At best, US troops will leave behind a corrupt dictatorship that will come to some kind of terms with the Ṭālibān. The country will continue to be used as a base for terrorism, which was the reason the US invaded it in the first place.

**

What is needed in both Iraq and Afghanistan is not a withdrawal strategy, but a winning strategy. For Iraq and Afghanistan to become viable states that won't collapse like a house of cards as soon as the last American troops leave, the insurgencies need to be defeated. In the case of Afghanistan, this also means addressing the insurgency in Pakistan.

Right now, none of these things are happening. With the Ṭālibān securely based in Pakistan, largely immune from US operations, there's going to be very little stopping them from retaking Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. The situation in Iraq looks slightly better, but again, there's very little standing in the way of the militias restarting a full-fledged civil war, with Iranian support, as soon as the Americans leave.

Both the Iraq and the Afghanistan war were badly conceived, poorly executed and massively expensive policy blunders. The wars in themselves weren't necessarily a bad idea; getting rid of the Ṭālibān and Saddam Hussein is a victory for the entire world. The way the George W. Bush administration went about them was the problem, and now the Obama administration is compounding the problem by essentially abandoning both countries to the islamists. I genuinely hope I'm wrong and nothing horrible happens. It's just incredibly difficult to see how either Iraq or Afghanistan can become anything other than failed states if Obama goes through with the withdrawal.

**

Israel

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the Obama administration has also had grandiose plans for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was even described as a top priority.

That said, this is a topic on which the administration, even the President himself, can't seem to make up their mind. A couple of years back, I wrote about how Obama visited Israel as president-elect and strongly supported Israel's reprisal air strikes. On the other hand, Obama had stressed the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and demanded that Israel stop its "settlement" construction. At Cairo, he told the audience that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements".

Any hopes of a fresh approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were dashed quite spectacularly in March 2010. As vice-president Joe Biden was visiting Israel, the Israeli government announced that it was going ahead with a plan to build 1,600 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem, in direct defiance of the Obama administration's demands that Israel halt "settlement" construction.

In diplomacy, this is what is called a slap in the face, and the Obama administration politely turned the other cheek.

This year, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched a new round of talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, going so far as to say that a Palestinian state could be achieved within a year. Anyone who felt skeptical was amply rewarded when the Israelis torpedoed the negotiations by deciding to continue "settlement" building in occupied territory. Again, the Obama administration was apparently powerless to react.

American policy-makers don't always seem to realize how crucially important the Palestinian issue is in the Middle East. Despite Obama's grandiose talk of a new beginning, his administration's policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in many ways been the worst possible choice. He's managed to antagonize Israel and the Israeli lobby in America, while failing to further the peace process or improve America's relations with the Muslim world.

**

Russia and Europe

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration announced plans to build a missile defense system based in Eastern Europe. The goal of the system is to defend the United States and Europe against small-scale missile attacks from a country like Iran or North Korea. The system the Bush administration planned would have a very limited capacity, and would be practically useless against a Russian nuclear attack. Nonetheless, the Russians were vocal in their protests against the system. Their opposition has nothing to do with missile defense in itself, but is geopolitical: a US missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic is a very strong guarantee to these countries that the United States is interested in their security versus Russia.

In August 2008 there was the Georgia war, or if you prefer the Sov...Russian nomenclature, the amred conflict in South Ossetia. According to the Russians, they have stationed peacekeepers in the sovereign states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These sovereign states are recognized by a wide variety of free countries, including and limited to Russia, Venezuela, Nauru and Nicaragua.

Nicaragua.

In what was apparently a colossal miscalculation, Georgia attacked the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which gave the Russians the perfect excuse to invade Georgia. This was old-fashioned sphere of influence politics: the Russians consider Georgia to be in their backyard, and they get to decide what happens in their backyard. It was also a brazen violation of international law and an invasion of a sovereign country. To make things worse, the country in question was a member of the NATO Partnership for Peace, and had recently hosted US troops on a joint exercise.

How did the Obama administration react to Russia's actions? By deciding to scrap the missile shield.

Guardian: US scraps plans for missile defence shield in central Europe

Barack Obama today reversed almost a decade of Pentagon strategy in Europe, scrapping plans to deploy key elements of a US missile defence shield.

Instead, he said, a more flexible defence would be introduced, allowing for a more effective response to any threat from Iranian missiles.

The U-turn is arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration, which spent years negotiating to place silos and interceptor missiles in Poland, and a radar complex in the Czech Republic.

The shift is a triumph for the Kremlin, which has long and vehemently argued that the shield is aimed at neutralising its intercontinental missiles; Moscow had warned of a return to a cold war arms race, and threatened to deploy nuclear missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave, surrounded by EU states.

Yes, of course the administration said that Russia shouldn't invade other countries, but this is the only concrete political action they took immediately following the crisis.

Viewed on its own merits, several commentators considered Obama's missile defense U-turn reasonable. That may be so, but this is to ignore the geopolitical significance of the missile shield for Eastern Europe. Viewed from the Kremlin, Obama's move to scrap the missile shield is pure weakness. The Americans come up with a plan; Moscow protests; the Americans retreat.

This wasn't the first time Obama was ready to sell out Eastern Europe, either. in March 2009, Obama approached the Russians on the subject with a letter.

NYT: Russia Welcomes Letter From Obama

The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said Tuesday that his administration was open to overtures from the United States on its proposed missile defense plan, but he dismissed the notion of a deal in which the United States would shelve the plan in exchange for Russia’s help on Iran.

The statement came in response to a report in The New York Times about a private letter from President Obama to his Russian counterpart, saying the proposed missile defense system would not be necessary if Moscow could help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons and nuclear warheads.

On the Foreign Policy website, a blog post described the letter as "Yalta all over again":

"it could also turn out to be a second coming of Yalta -- a sell-out of America's eastern European allies of epic proportions."

The Yalta Conference was held at Yalta in February 1945 between these three gentlemen and their entourages.

One of the topics of the conference was no less than the division of Europe into two spheres of influence. Probably the most infamous example is Churchill's draft proposal, which he pencilled out on a sheet of paper: he suggested to Stalin that they divide up Central Europe between themselves, listing names of countries and percentages of influence each side would have. For example, Romania would be 90% Soviet and 10% Western, with Greece the opposite. On a smaller scale, Yalta was where the Western Allies agreed to repatriate all Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, regardless of their own wishes or their upcoming fate. This meant death for thousands at the hands of Stalin's execution squads.

In short, at Yalta the western allies sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets. The comparison may be exaggerated, but the way Barack Obama's administration has reacted to the Georgian war certainly doesn't show strength. Offering to trade the missile defence of NATO to the Russians in exchange for fuzzy diplomatic guarantees is unlikely to send a strong message that the United States is committed to resisting Russian expansionism, and the failure to react in any way to the invasion of Georgia only strengthens the message. If anything, the weakness of the Obama administration will embolden the Russians to act more aggressively inside what they consider their sphere of influence. As I'm writing this blog post uncomfortably close to the Russian border, I can say that this is bad news for all of us over here.

It isn't just relations with Eastern Europe that Obama seems intent on sabotaging, though. He caused a stir in 2009 by seeming to downplay the UK-US "special relationship", prompting the Daily Telegraph to ask:

DT: Will Barack Obama end Britain's special relationship with America?

A British official said: "I don't think Obama is steeped in the tradition of the special relationship going back to Churchill and Roosevelt. Of course someone of his generation is going to look at it differently. I think what he looks at are the assets that are brought to the table and the expertise you have. This is a definite change of emphasis."

In the six decades since in which Winston Churchill first coined the phrase special relationship, successive American presidents have paid ritual obeisance to the notion that Britain should assume a place at the White House top table.

Now even allies of Mr Obama believe he intends to extract a higher price for access to the corridors of his power.

This might seem overly paranoid, but a year later, Argentina brought out an old hobby-horse: the Falklands. The Argentinians consider the Falkland Islands their territory, but the islands' British-born population does not. Earlier this year, Argentina threatened to blockade the islands, and Venezuela's dear leader strongly supported them. As a blogger for the Telegraph put it:

So far, the mounting Falklands conflict has been met with deafening silence from Washington. Both the White House and State Department have failed to comment on the situation, despite a significant heightening of tensions. Not only is this another striking failure of leadership on the part of the US administration, but it also demonstrates an extraordinary level of indifference towards America’s closest ally.

As far as Europe is concerned, Obama's foreign policy looks worryingly like an effort to appease the Russians at the expense of Europe.

**

All in all, I consider President Obama's foreign policy so far to be a total failure. He has brought no leadership and no new vision to US foreign policy. The mere fact of his election, and the rhetoric of the first few months, seemed to raise the world's opinion of the United States, and got him the Nobel Peace Prize. A prize that was earlier given to organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Grameen Bank, and since to an imprisoned Chinese human rights activist, was given to an American president for making a speech. To paraphrase a percentage-jotting alcoholic, never has so much been awarded to so few for so little.

Obama did succeed in raising hope; where he failed was in capitalizing on it. His Middle Eastern policies range from the inept to the potentially catastrophic, and his humiliation by Israel has effectively ended any hope of an outreach to the Muslim world. If his administration has had any impact on relations with Europe, it has been a negative one, undermining the special relationship with the UK, destabilizing NATO and encouraging the Russians in their quest to become a superpower with a Cold War-like sphere of influence.

I haven't really mentioned East Asia, as I don't feel that I'm qualified to comment on it, but suffice to say that the Obama administration has attracted criticism for a soft policy on China as well, preferring to concentrate on economic interests to the detriment of human rights.

One of the many great injustices of a representative democracy is that in foreign policy, as in nearly all other fields, the consequences of Obama's actions will be borne by his successor. If the rest of his term plays out like this, the next guy is getting a bum deal.